The Laker/Lutz News

Serving Pasco since 1981/Serving Lutz since 1964

Tom Jackson

Ridge Road extension needed to avert potential disaster

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There I was on a recent Monday morning, headed west on State Road 54 on my way to one of the several part-time jobs that occupy me since the demise of the Tampa Tribune.

And, it was all good.

I had my podcast going on. I was making good time. The consumption indicator in my car’s computer reported I was cruising at more than 40 miles per gallon. As much as a 60-something guy not on his way to play golf on a weekday could be, I was content.

Then, seconds past the railroad crossing at Land O’ Lakes Boulevard, there it was: a sea of glowing brake lights announcing a three-lane parking lot stretching around the gentle bend leading to Oakstead.

Sam Beneck, Pasco County’s Ridge Road project manager, and Margaret Smith, the county’s engineering services director, stand in the are where the Ridge Road extension would go. (Tom Jackson/Photo)
Sam Beneck, Pasco County’s Ridge Road project manager, and Margaret Smith, the county’s engineering services director, stand in the are where the Ridge Road extension would go.
(Tom Jackson/Photo)

Ahead, a Pasco County Sheriff’s deputy’s patrol car sat broadside to the stopped traffic near a break in the median. And beyond, past another half-mile of stopped traffic, by the landmark sign for Stonegate, flashed the lights of a rescue vehicle.

We sat like that for 20-odd minutes, until the deputy whose car blocked our path began directing us through the median cut that ordinarily was off-limits to westbound travelers.

I can’t say how long traffic was blocked, or how long it had been stymied when I came upon it. Neither the sheriff’s office nor the Florida Highway Patrol could produce a record of the incident.

But, while I am left to guess at the duration, I’m certain about the rest: For at least an hour, if not longer, on that recent Monday morning, all of Pasco County east of U.S. 41 was one incident on State Road 52 from being cut off from the western half of the county, including Sunlake High School, the Suncoast Parkway, the west-side government complex, Trinity, U.S. 19 and the Gulf.

What would it have taken? Another gas leak, like the one that shut down State Road 54 near Starkey Boulevard in late June, would have done it. Another manhunt like the one in early June near Safety Town. A mishap in a construction zone. Something going wrong at the CSX crossing. A sinkhole.

That morning it was westbound traffic under threat. Tomorrow it could be eastbound, or, with just the right confluence of misadventures, all traffic in both directions.

Clearly, two east-west thoroughfares, separated by a dozen miles, are no longer sufficient for a county of nearly 465,000 extremely mobile residents, and who knows how many more passing through. If only Pasco planners had some sort of strategy to address this looming concern.

Oh, wait. They do.

It’s called the Ridge Road extension, an 8-mile, multi-lane, limited-access highway that, while splitting the difference between state roads 52 and 54, would provide a vital third link between New Port Richey and Land O’ Lakes.

It’s been part of the county’s comprehensive transportation plan since before we knew about Monica and Bill, before the dot-com bubble, even before smartphones. The Ridge Road extension plan has been around so long, biker jackets and real estate had time to be cool, fall out of favor and become cool again.

And, with certain construction caveats, building it ought to be a no-brainer.

Which is where Margaret Smith and Sam Beneck, a couple of affable civil engineers who love making things work better, come in. Smith, as director of engineering services for Pasco County, is Beneck’s boss. Beneck, 31, a Virginia Tech graduate who cut his transportation teeth trying to improve the commuting nightmare around Washington D.C., is the Ridge Road extension project manager.

Everything that worries me about having just two east-west thoroughfares concerns them, too, but they absolutely obsess about what happens when everybody living along the U.S. 19 corridor waits (as you know they will) until the very last moment before fleeing for high ground in the face of the inevitable Big One. Or the Sort-of-Big or even Medium One, given how much of the coast, from Palm Harbor north, is floodplain.

As Beneck explains, by the time the first bands of a serious tropical event arrive, “The Courtney Campbell Causeway is going to be underwater. Everybody in northern Pinellas is going to be coming north.”

On a good day, there’s not enough space on State Road 54 to accommodate everybody, even if authorities converted all of it to one-way eastbound. When the bad day happens — engineers don’t deal in “if” — Pasco will need another eastbound artery.

As my recent Monday scenario demonstrated, Pasco already does.

Environmentalists reliably push back, claiming any number of things that either aren’t necessarily true, or authorities could prevent.

For instance, the Ridge Road extension would go through the Serenova Preserve, which was set aside as mitigation for the Suncoast Parkway. Why put a highway through a mitigation zone?

Because the Serenova agreement anticipated the extension; proof is in the expensive overpass at the Suncoast’s Mile Marker 25.2, precisely where the extension is projected to emerge from the Serenova and link up with the toll road before plunging ahead toward Land O’ Lakes Boulevard.

But, it will be disruptive to wildlife. Yes. Preserving human life, or simply making it more convenient, sometimes is. Still, highway planners are not heartless. Lots of them — I can cite at least two — love long bicycle rides on paths otherwise set aside for nature.

“That’s why I live in Land O’ Lakes,” Smith says. “I’m never more than 10 minutes from a park.”

Accordingly, the project calls for at least eight wildlife crossings and two bridges, and, according to Smith and Beneck, a rather spectacular bicycle path.

Well, it’ll certainly lead to more development. Well, not in the Serenova. And, if the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — whose approval stands between the planners and groundbreaking — stick to its limited-access guns, not much will spring up on the Suncoast-to-U.S. 41 stretch.

All that remains, apparently, is a proper tweaking of the route with an eye to the least possible impact at the best possible construction price. The money is set aside. The time has never been better.

Twin disasters a dozen miles apart is not unimaginable. And, every day that passes without it happening is a day closer to the day it will.

Tom Jackson, a resident of New Tampa, is interested in your ideas. To reach him, email .

Big Ed takes another bite out of summer

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The heir apparent rose early last Wednesday — pre-dawn early — to greet his official transmogrification from rising senior to the full-fledged real thing.

This sort of event repeats itself, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, more than 3.4 million times each year, making it the very definition of normal. Nonetheless, when the rite arrived in the Jackson household, the boy’s parents reserved the right to have their breath taken away.

A member of the Tampa Catholic High School Class of 2017, his graduation is set for May 24. While the date does not yet loom large on the family calendar, if past is indeed prelude, we’ll be hearing “Pomp and Circumstance” in a virtual heartbeat.

For now, however, the family to-do list is crowded with other, more immediate concerns, including, but not limited to, prepping for another round of college-entrance tests, applying to said colleges, reserving Friday nights for football (the boy, risking his ears but not his cranium, beats a bass drum for the Crusaders) and making sure there’s always enough stuff in the refrigerator to quell the growling of his stomach.

What is it about school, by the way, that makes teenaged boys even hungrier than usual?

So, we’re back in the academic swing, being ruled once more by its rhythmic pulse … and I still can’t help but feel like we’re doing all of this too soon. By two weeks, at least. Hillsborough County public schools opened last week, dragging some private schools along with them. In Pasco, the school board — demonstrating admirable restraint — waited until Monday to ring the opening bell.

In short, the first day of school has crept, once again and to my dismay, into the first half of August. Labor Day, once the great anchor to which the start of the school year was chained, has been pulverized for the convenience of Big Education, becoming just another long weekend in our academic marathon.

Others once ferociously committed to keeping August, or most of it anyway, reserved for low-key road trips, family reunions or summer camp, appear to have succumbed. An Internet check of the “Save Our Summers” state groups — mostly alarmed parents supported by tourist-sensitive business operators — returns, mostly, defunct web pages.

After all, they’d essentially carried the day, successfully lobbying legislatures to link the first day of school to Labor Day, beating back opening days that had, in some states, crept into the first week of August. In some states the link was a week. In Florida it was 14 days, with limited exemptions for high-performing districts.

Superintendents, school boards and, especially, teachers’ unions groused, to no avail. Until last spring, that is, when representatives of Big Ed hit upon this year’s late Labor Day (Sept. 7) as the perfect wedge argument.

Waiting until Aug. 24 to open schools meant it would be impossible to squeeze in a full semester before the Christmas — er, winter — break, leaving students to carry the burden of midterm exams through their holiday. School lobbyists argued successfully that this disjointedness was no way to run an academic schedule.

That certainly sounds reasonable. But the argument really hinges on what we’d like our schools to achieve. If it’s packing all the assignments and exams into a compressed, tidy timeframe, then, bravo. Starting in the first half of August is the ticket.

If, on the other hand, we’d like students to retain what they’ve been taught, postponing exams until after the break is the superior strategy.

I readily confess, I like the contrarian argument, because, as — apparently — one of the last bitter clingers in the save-our-summers camp, it boosts my argument. But, the studies are real.

Investigators call the two methods “binge and purge” and “the spacing effect.”

In the first, students learn at a breakneck pace (the binge), then dump it on their exams (the purge). The result is rapidly dissipating knowledge.

In the second, gaps are inserted between teaching/learning and testing. And the results, dating back decades, are astonishing.

In an article on “spaced education” in the November-December 2009 edition of Harvard magazine, sociologist/editor Craig Lambert identified, “More than 10 rigorous studies on medical students and residents using randomized trials have shown its efficacy: it can increase knowledge by up to 50 percent, and strengthen retention for up to two years.”

There was even a study published at the height of the Save Our Summers frenzy entitled, “Why Taking Exams After Winter Break Is Best For Students: What the Experts Say,” which wrapped the entire argument for longer summers and gap-enhanced testing in a rather flamboyant and unmistakable bow.

Not that I expect to persuade anybody at this point. Conventional wisdom is so deeply baked into the earlier-start rubric you couldn’t dig it out with a melon baller.

Heck, I even have the heir apparent and his mom working against me. Both seem happy to have gotten on with it.

Me, I’m still with “Auntie Mame” Dennis, who, reminded in the closing scene that she needs to have her grandnephew back from India in time for the start of school — the day after Labor Day — answers exquisitely, “Naturally. Of course. Labor Day. That’s sometime in November, isn’t it?”

Tom Jackson, a resident of New Tampa, is interested in your ideas. To reach him, email .

Published August 17, 2016

We’re all summoned to battle Zika’s threat

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As promised — no, as feared — Zika has come ashore, invading Florida, most likely from Latin America, replicating the first wave of a map from a science fiction movie. Soon, because we are mobile and restless, it could be everywhere.

What emerged out of a Ugandan rainforest, a virus that sickens some adults with aches and rashes but is linked to horrific deformities to babies in the womb, has come to America the modern way: not through the vampiric work of infected flying insects, but probably on the wings of Boeing jets, or aboard a luxury cruise ship.

Dennis Moore, Pasco County’s mosquito control director, holds a container with Aedes aegypti young adults — some are still in the larval stage. (Tom Jackson/Photo)
Dennis Moore, Pasco County’s mosquito control director, holds a container with Aedes aegypti young adults — some are still in the larval stage.
(Tom Jackson/Photo)

Somebody visited someplace where Zika is rampant, picked it up and came home, possibly — because the symptoms in adults often are too subtle to notice — without knowing he was sick.

But now that it’s here, it’s most likely mosquitos — specifically the aggressive, daylight-active Aedes (from the Greek for “odious”) aegypti — that will enable its spread.

The good news, to the extent that anything regarding Zika can be regarded as good, is that as of late last week, reports of the virus being spread by mosquitos remained contained to Miami. Otherwise, Zika cases across the state, including about a half-dozen in Pasco County and 10 in Hillsborough County, are evidently travel-related.

That, of course, could change overnight. An infected person back from vacation goes out for the night, suffers a bite, and what started as an exotic respite in Belize or St. Martin triggers an outbreak back home.

Which is why, more than ever, we need to know what’s going on at the Pasco County Mosquito Control District. To be sure, we remain on the front line of beating back the menace of the opportunistic Aedes aegypti, which uses our bad — or at least risky — habits to its reproductive advantage.

Mosquitos rely on collections of still water for egg-laying and early stage development. While its cousins prefer natural collection points, such as water lettuce, water hyacinths, ditches and tidal puddles, Aedes aegypti seeks out human-caused pools, everything from discarded tires to bird baths to mop buckets to the kids’ beach toys.

If it’s outside and it’ll hold water, it’s even money the female Aedes aegypti considers it a nursery.

Everybody who’s spent time in the South, especially Florida, already knows — or ought to know — this. Oddly, though, it’s usually not until reports of some alarming public health menace makes the news that most of us take a mental inventory of the possible collection sites under our jurisdiction.

Well, that and you’re under the icy, cobalt gaze of entomologist Dennis Moore, Pasco’s mosquito control director, who has three words for us: “Drain and cover.”

I might have gone with “Dump and cover,” because it sounds more like “duck and cover,” but the message is the same. We should deny Zika’s “vector” mosquito breeding space wherever we can, but because we can’t count on our neighbors, we should cover ourselves (with clothes and effective insect repellant) and our residences (with screens in good repair).

Moore says this even as the part of the district’s program with which we are most familiar — the distinctly orange spray trucks — prepare for another night of going to war with mosquitos out for a “blood meal.”

What we might not know, but find reassuring, is the district also employs airborne tactics — a pair of low-flying Aztec airplanes and a couple of helicopters — to attack mosquitos in rural and coastal areas in their larval stage; airboats to kill off lake and pond vegetation that collects water; amphibious vehicles to go where airboats cannot go; and, where vehicular intervention or mass attacks are impractical, handheld foggers for that personal touch.

What we also might not know, but find fascinating, is that craftsmen, welders and mechanics working for the district fabricate much of what Pasco’s mosquito hunters use. This is not due to a lack of off-the-shelf stuff, Moore says, but because his people can take the elemental parts — a Briggs & Stratton engine and a sprayer, for instance — and create the blower linkage that makes a better, cheaper mosquito killer.

“And, when it breaks,” Moore says, “we know how to fix it, because we built it.”

For instance, those pesticide-holding tanks on the bottoms of the Aztecs? They’re fiberglass sprung from molds fashioned by the machine shop. You can buy them off the rack for about $30,000, Moore explains, but the district’s do-it-themselves tanks cost about one-sixth as much.

Meanwhile, back in the lab, researchers are growing mosquitos, which become tiny wriggling and buzzing lab rats for the testing of various types and combinations of mosquito-specific pesticides and growth-inhibitors.

And, they know where to spray because of a full-time trapping program.

Why the fussiness? Because the Pasco Mosquito Control District is an agency unto itself, with a board (two of whom face re-election challengers in November) and a $6 million budget that corresponds with a line item on Pasco property owners’ tax bills.

Being responsible for itself means being able to pivot more quickly when conditions change. Nobody has to go to the county commission for an emergency budget adjustment.

On that front, nothing changes until it does, Moore says, “and then, it’ll change fast and a lot.”

To meet the challenge, the agency would add staff and ramp up training, both of which could challenge the district’s bottom line. If that happens, the three-member board will have some choices to make. But they will be their choices, not the choices of a county commission with layers of concerns.

For now, the capable folks at the district will do what they can to make our next barbecue, sidewalk cafe visit, after-work golf getaway or trip to the park as nuisance-free as science can make it.

But, like the man said, they can’t do it alone, and Zika is out there. Drain and cover, y’all. Drain and cover.

Tom Jackson, a resident of New Tampa, is interested in your ideas. To reach him, email .

Published August 10, 2016

We’re going to need better thinking caps

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We are mere days away from a joltingly early start to the new school year, but instead of looking ahead to new supplies that speak of fresh challenges, our gaze has been diverted to an unexpectedly worrisome past.

Results of the Florida Standards Assessments rolled out last month, and, well, yikes.

All of a sudden, your neighborhood A school, or your B school you were absolutely certain was on the rise, is, according to the latest report, backsliding.

Of the 79 Pasco schools for which the state reported grades (four received scores of incomplete), 36 slipped at least one grade. The number of A schools shrank by half, to 14 from 28. Overall, Pasco’s district grade slid from a B to a C.

Those looking for good news will find little, but there is this: The number of schools receiving an F dipped to two from three. So there’s that.

Understandably, the generally glum news triggered general apoplexy. In a carefully worded press release, Pasco Schools Superintendent Kurt Browning nodded to “very challenging times” as a result of “the transition to new standards.”

“New standards” is the key phrase, and about them retiring state Sen. John Legg (R-Trinity), who oversaw the K-12 committee that drafted the perplexing grading scheme, says: Calm down.

Naturally, that’s easier said than done when everything from state education funds to property values to neighborhood and personal prestige are riding on the local school’s grade. As Legg readily concedes, “Everybody wants to go to an A school.”

I mean, Pine View Elementary, which never scored below a B and last year earned an A, suddenly merits a C? And Seven Oaks Elementary, the very principal’s honor roll of grade schools, dips to a B? The tiger moms of Land O’ Lakes and Wesley Chapel cannot be amused.

And still the senator says: Chill. Here’s how Legg, who’s also an administrator at Dayspring Academy, a pre-K-11 Pasco County charter school, lays it out: Schools that dropped a grade or even three did not necessarily change from being good or even excellent to something else entirely.

The reason, instead, is the new and — fingers seriously crossed here — improved grading system, one that doesn’t simply weigh student performance against an absolute standard, but, in an attempt to weed out socioeconomic variables, also grades year-over-year improvement.

Legg likens the new grading plan to a baseball game.

“We saw a lot of schools [from wealthier communities] decline because, basically, they started on third base, and they didn’t get the runner home,” Legg says. “Then you have a school like Lacoochee [Elementary], where the kids come to the plate with two strikes. If teachers can figure out how to get them on base, they deserve points for that.”

Balancing the achievement of schools that bang out gimme RBIs against those that teach the difficult art of reaching first is at the heart of the educational Sabermetrics that inspired the performance-plus-improvement measuring sticks.

To elaborate, schools that draw well-to-do students might hit high marks time and again. While they took home plaudits for their natural advantage, it was an open question whether they were increasing the quality of their students’ learning year-over-year.

Conversely, schools with high populations of free and reduced-lunch students might not score as high academically in any given year as their richer cousins, but if they close the grade-level gap — if their students rise from two years behind to one year behind — that’s a clear indicator that something good is happening.

Earlier grading systems did not account for stagnation or improvement, or for rich-school/poor-school disparities, as top administrators and teachers’ union chiefs alike routinely complained.

The new assessments reflect an imperfect attempt to level the playing field. Accordingly, there is likely to be, at the very least, short-term pain while administrators and teachers probe the maze in search of happier outcomes.

This, of course, assumes such probing is possible. Browning is clearly skeptical, and other administrators have called the new system “complicated and confusing.”

For his part, Legg prefers to think of the new plan as detailed and precise, declaring himself confident the infusion of “additional variables” to the education equation “provides a more accurate description of what’s going on” in each school.

This must have been what the preeminent baseball stat-cruncher Bill James — inventor of Sabermetrics — must have felt like when he discovered his landmark “runs created” stat.

To be clear: The results from 2014-15 set the baseline. The results from 2015-16 are the first to measure year-over-year improvement. That, Legg contends, is “why we saw a variety of directions.” Next year’s reports will provide “an even stronger” indicator of what’s going on within each school, just as year-over-year sales reports indicate how individual stores are faring against history.

This is good stuff to know. And, it’s why Legg pushes back against trashing the A-F grading system.

“If we didn’t have school grades, we couldn’t even ask these questions,” Legg says. “They wouldn’t know what’s happening.

“Take away school grades and we’d go straight back to the ’90s, when kids were graduating from high school and couldn’t read their diplomas. We’d go looking for what went wrong, and there’d be nothing there to figure it out.”

Another session of aggregating data — also known as the school year — looms dead ahead. Here’s hoping everyone involved greets the challenges ahead with perfectly fitted thinking caps.

Because, the work of academic achievement is not for sissies.

Tom Jackson, a resident of New Tampa, is interested in your ideas. To reach him, email .

Published August 3, 2016

From Dade City, making Gator history

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Stipulated: Father-son combinations are scarcely so rare as to be particularly newsworthy in and of themselves. We’ve had father-son presidents of the United States, twice, and fathers have been handing off everything from international corporations to small family businesses almost since the idea of commerce emerged.

How ancient? The Abraham of Genesis begat the business of building great nations to Isaac and, if unwittingly, Ishmael.

Len Johnson, standing, and Hjalma Johnson are the first father-son presidents of Gators Boosters Inc., the fundraising arm of the University of Florida’s athletic association. (Tom Jackson/Photo)
Len Johnson, standing, and Hjalma Johnson are the first father-son presidents of Gators Boosters Inc., the fundraising arm of the University of Florida’s athletic association.
(Tom Jackson/Photo)

All of that is prelude to establish this: My deep roots in the University of Florida’s Gator Nation notwithstanding, I wouldn’t argue the newsworthiness of the following extension of the father-son tradition unless it were genuinely unique.

And, it is.

A couple of months ago, Len Johnson, 59, the Dade City-reared lawyer, became the 35th president of Gator Boosters Inc., the 14,000-member fundraising arm of The University Athletic Association Inc.

Len’s dad, the peripatetic Hjalma (pronounced “yomma,” rhymes with “comma”), whose reputation for joyful tears has made him the Fountain of Triple J. Ranch, was the group’s president during 2006-07 — undeniably the best year in University of Florida athletic history, if not the best year in the history of any big-college athletic program. And at a buoyant 81, Hjalma has a diamond-encrusted championship ring sandwich— a national football title between back-to-back basketball crowns — to show for it.

Still, we promised uniqueness, and we shall not disappoint: For all the legacy families tied to UF that have been prominent in Florida’s economy, politics and history, the Johnsons of Dade City are the first father-son presidents of Gator Boosters Inc. The absolute first.

And, to think Len’s old man once tried to scuttle this first-of-its-kind legacy. (OK, not really, but it makes an inviting tale.)

When the moment arrived a couple of years back to line up the president for 2016-17, executives and officers polled a key sample of the membership for a slate of candidates. On the appointed day for assembling the electors — most at UF’s athletic offices in Gainesville, some, like Hjalma, joining by speaker phone — then-President Rex Farrior III, the Tampa attorney/investor. Farrior, a one-time New York Yankees minor leaguer and former area youth sports star, declared only one name had been placed in nomination: Double-Gator Leonard H. Johnson, who earned UF degrees in business administration (1978) and law (1980).

At his office-shrine off the U.S. 98 Bypass in Dade City, Hjalma could hear murmurings of cheer accompanied by the approving rapping of knuckles on the boardroom table. Even as his heart swelled and his eyes puddled, Hjalma couldn’t resist playing the imp.

“Before you make a hasty decision,” the old Gator (industrial engineering degree, 1958) interjected with a teasing wink that was almost audible, “I want the board to know I have a lengthy c.v. (curriculum vitae, or life resume) on this Johnson fellow, and I’d like all the members to review it before they take a vote they might come to regret.”

“Hold it right there,” Farrior, 30 years Johnson’s junior, said from Gainesville, his voice crackling over the speaker phone in Dade City. “I’m going to say something to you I’ve been waiting nearly 10 years to say. Hjalma … you’re overruled.”

With that, the deed was done. Len Johnson, son of the weeping orator, became by acclamation president-elect.

Days later, Hjalma rang up Executive Assistant Rebecca Mahony, the group’s unofficial historian, wondering how long it would take to compile a list of all previous father-son Gator Boosters presidents.

“Not long,” Mahony replied. “In fact, I can give it to you right now. You and Len are it. It’s never happened before.”

Cue tears.

The president’s duties are substantially, but not entirely, ceremonial. As president of “The Team Behind the Teams,” Johnson is, in many ways, the head of the UF athletic program’ chamber of commerce. He’ll be part of on-field and on-court ceremonies, such as the one when Florida Field is officially renamed for Len’s first Gator hero, Steve Spurrier, the Heisman Trophy winner and legendary football coach.

Len also will be among the ribbon-cutters when the Stephen C. O’ Connell Center — home to the Gators’ indoor sports — reopens in December after a $64.5 million renovation, two-thirds of it financed by Gator Boosters efforts.

But, his prime directive is spearheading the group’s expansionist ambitions. Not that 14,000 reliable contributors — about 750 of them annual $15,000 “Bull Gators” — is small swamp cabbage. However, says Len, “We need to have 50,000. We need to increase the number who identify with the university at whatever level” they can muster, who will say, with their checkbooks, “Yeah, I’m a Gator.”

It’s an uphill climb, Len concedes, in an era when network contracts broadcast almost every game into the homes of fans where, “they have 70-inch high-def TVs, comfortable couches and the beer’s cheap.

“Support slips, when attendance falls, and that’s across the [Southeastern Conference],” he adds, increasing the challenge for a group that raises about $60 million a year.

While noting the clear differences between the son, known for stoicism and a dry wit, and his ebullient dad, Rex Farrior III is confident about the group’s leader, calling him “solid and methodical.” Len Johnson, Farrior says, sticks to his task even in the midst of upheaval.

Farrior’s confidence is sure to be tested, with two second-year coaches overseeing the university’s highest-profile sports and the pending retirement of long-serving Athletic Director Jeremy Foley.

On the other paw, all that change might herald the approach of opportunity. If it comes, new Gator Boosters President Len Johnson, the arid-cheeked first of his kind, should be uniquely qualified to tackle it.

Tom Jackson, a resident of New Tampa, is interested in your ideas. To reach him, email .

Published July 27, 2016

Is there nothing Pokémon Go can’t do?

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There was, according to the signs on the heir apparent’s mobile phone, a Dodrio somewhere nearby, and as experts in the field will assure you, a Dodrio sighting is as rare as it is pulse-quickening.

Which explains how the lad — using the term loosely; at 17, he’s half a head taller than his old man — and I found ourselves tramping about Tallahassee’s Oakland Cemetery well past sundown on a recent night, our steps illuminated only by a half-moon, the spillover from distant street lamps and the glow from his iPhone-turned-tracking-device.

Chris Jackson and Pidgey, a Pokémon Go creature, loosed in our three-dimensional world. (Courtesy of Tom Jackson)
Chris Jackson and Pidgey, a Pokémon Go creature, loosed in our three-dimensional world.
(Courtesy of Tom Jackson)

Alas, our prey, the flightless, three-headed avian invention of some Japanese animator’s playful nightmare, was as elusive as straight talk in the state capital, and we soon packed it in. But not before we exchanged waves and encouraging shouts with a family of four — mom, dad and their two elementary-school-aged youngsters, one boy, one girl — who engaged in a similar quest in augmented reality: Find and trap Pokémon creatures loosed on our three-dimensional world.

Fads being fleeting, this one might be over already, replaced by another urgency-of-the-moment — remember Donald Trump’s promise to self-fund his campaign? — and Nintendo might have surrendered its absurd, two-day, $7 billion surge in market cap.

Maybe not. In fact, I hope not. Others more sophisticated than me were prepared to despair over the sudden phenomenon of Pokémon Go, a cutting-edge wrinkle on the age-old treasure hunt game, and their snarky dismissiveness is fine by me.

What I know, instead, is the same kid who, left to his preferences, would join with his computer like some pajama-clad member of the Borg collective, has, because of Pokémon Go, rediscovered, unbidden, the use of his legs and the joy of his neglected bicycle.

For this alone, I believe what others have reported, that from solving crime to finding true love to affecting property values, there’s almost nothing Pokémon Go can’t do.

Let me add this: I know next to nothing about Pokémon, except that the concept always struck me as cruel: Round up cute little monsters, raise them and then send them into an arena to destroy their cousins. Are we sure that’s not at least as soul-twisting as the other role-playing games of video slaughter?

As I say, however, I scarcely know enough to comment. If you ask me, Charizard sounds like something for lighting the grill; Dratini might be a gin cocktail with almost no vermouth; Butterfree is what you get when you order lo-cal mashed potatoes; and anytime someone says “Pikachu!” I have to resist responding, “Gesundheit!” OK, that last one is an old, old joke.

Now, retreating a little, the vexatious Dodrio only partly explains how we happened to be where we were.

The fuller explanation is last week, the boy (a rising high school senior) and I spent a couple of days touring rival state universities in Gainesville and Tallahassee. It is — I hear — one of those traditions fathers and sons gaze back on as prime bonding episodes, moments where, in the fullness of time, they began to recognize themselves as equals, partners and peers, each seeing the other as if through a glass, reflected and reflecting.

There I was. Here he will be.

Perhaps, ultimately, we will see those days as having performed that ritualistic trick. But in real time, tromping across the steamy hills of the universities of Florida and Florida State with dozens of other prospective students and their parents, the heir apparent plainly regarded the entire affair as a safari in target-rich Pokémon hunting grounds.

Then again, so did about 90 percent of the three dozen of us laboring across the FSU campus. I know because when one of the guides asked who was playing Pokémon Go, my view was obliterated by the sudden forest of arms.

As I say, I’m not complaining. The game prompted a half-hour father-son walk in the rain late last week, and I listened while my son explained evolutions and living dex — which sounds like “living decks,” but is not a platform for lounging, from what I gather — and CPs, or combat points.

Do I wish we’d been talking about baseball’s trading deadline, the prospects for improved offensive line play by the Buccaneers or which of the unknowns will quarterback our (yes, he’s ready to commit, it looks like) Gators this fall? I did.

But, this is a genuinely good and coachable kid who rarely has done anything more annoying than forget to turn in his homework, so I consider myself a dad blessed.

And, when I asked whether there was a Pokémon that might feel at home in Gainesville, he was able to answer without hesitation there was. It’s something called a Feraligatr, a spectacularly azure bipedal crocodilian that looks like what you’d get if you crossed a leghorn rooster and Albert, the UF mascot.

So, common ground.

As it turns out, there really isn’t anything Pokémon Go can’t do.

Tom Jackson, a resident of New Tampa, is interested in your ideas. To reach him, email .

Published July 20, 2016

Apparently, we think Pasco is on the right track

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With November’s quadrennial Election Day looming ever larger on our calendars, the importance of what Americans tell pollsters about the condition of the country swells almost by the moment.

Indeed, it scarcely matters just now, in the middle of July 2016, whether you’re with Hillary or you’re aboard the Trump train, or even if you’re checking out the shrewd looniness of Libertarian Gary Johnson. What genuinely matters, because it will guide your inspection of our sorry gaggle of presidential contenders, is what you think about the direction the country is headed.

It’s called the “right track/wrong track” poll, and it’s supposed to reveal the electorate’s general mood — which, at the moment, isn’t pretty. Lately, the Real Clear Politics average favors “wrong track” by a whopping 65.1 percent. And, the trend is in the direction of a widening, worsening gap.

Obviously, a poll that provides only a this-or-that option cannot effectively identify what might prompt someone to choose one track over the other. Most likely — given the stubborn, roughly 50-50 split within American politics — it’s even-money your reasons for thinking we’re on the wrong track are different from your neighbor’s, or mine.

But, the mere fact that two-thirds of us find our direction disturbing reinforces the notion that whatever November brings, the outcome will reflect the nation’s desire for some sort of change.

You know, unless, by delivering another round of division and stalemate, it doesn’t.

Anyway, it is against that stormy backdrop that an utterly counterintuitive, if not downright weird, thing happened recently in Pasco County. The date for candidate qualifying came and went a few weeks ago, leaving in its wake a robust — if intensely localized — argument against the dug-in disgruntlement that plagues America.

An even dozen Pasco-linked candidates, officeholders and first-time office-seekers alike, won election without opposition: a congressman, four constitutional officers, two school board members and five of six members of Pasco’s state legislative delegation. Only Pinellas-based Jack Latvala, a Republican state senator, will see his name on a ballot, and that’s only because a couple of write-in candidates signed up.

Even so, there will be local tussles, and they could be lively.

All three county commission seats will be contested. The property appraiser’s job, opened by Mike Wells’ retirement, lured two Republicans (including District 1 County Commissioner Ted Schrader) and a Democrat. County Clerk and Comptroller Paula O’Neil has drawn a lightly financed return challenger.

And, as they always are, both Mosquito Control Board races will be contested — which, given the pest-borne Zika virus threat, will require our particular attention this year.

Still, not counting the County Court judge’s election and assorted hyper-local CDD races, that’s seven contests out of a possible 19 in a year portrayed as the most contentious in living memory.

Our comparatively peaceful election landscape figures, at least in part, from Pasco’s increasingly rightward tilt. As of late last week, Republicans, who’ve held a registration plurality in the county for 17 years, owned a record 21,000-voter edge over Democrats.

Not unexpectedly, then, the GOP has a virtual lockdown in Pasco; New Port Richey-based Democratic state Rep. Amanda Murphy, also re-elected without opposition, is the lone exception. Pasco hasn’t elected a Democrat running countywide since Michael Cox bumped former pal Steve Simon off the county commission in a memorable revenge match in 2006.

Still, as occasional Democratic successes suggest, what recently prevailed here isn’t entirely about party advantages. Instead, it seems easily as likely what is afoot is a conviction among Pasco voters that their county, and to the extent they can influence it, their state, are on the right track.

That sense of well-being would naturally flow to their representatives. And why not?

In Tallahassee, a rising Speaker of the House (Richard Corcoran) and a probable Senate president (Wilton Simpson) give Pasco influence disproportionate to its size. And Rep. Danny Burgess, of Zephyrhills, carries an air of earnest concern for his constituents.

Back home, a unifying theme of openness, accessibility, accountability and citizen-service runs through all Pasco’s constitutional offices, and their elected chiefs deserve a mention: Sheriff Chris Nocco, Supervisor of Elections Brian Corley, Superintendent of Schools Kurt Browning, Tax Collector Mike Fasano, as well as the aforementioned O’Neil and Wells.
No, these acknowledgements aren’t intended to represent the views of all Pasco voters, just as right-track/wrong-track polls don’t attempt to ascertain what bugs those who are unhappy. But, if anywhere close to even 40 percent of us were genuinely upset with those who were re-elected by acclamation last month, you can bet they would have drawn some sort of organized resistance.

After all, if the presidential primaries taught us anything, it is the year for electoral arson. Come the general, the national friction may yet spark a local fire, but it will pass, and those who look after our day-to-day concerns will remain, unsinged.

Because that, evidently, is just how we like it.

Tom Jackson, a resident of New Tampa, is interested in your ideas. To reach him, email .

Published July 13, 2016

The agony of justice frozen in legal amber

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An aphorism as old as jurisprudence itself is enduring a strain in the courtroom of Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Judge Susan Barthle. You know the one: “Justice delayed is justice denied.”

Tom Jackson rgbLast week, Barthle set a February hearing for the linchpin of the infamous movie house shooting case, in which only one relevant fact is not in dispute: Retired Tampa police captain Curtis Reeves Jr., used his .380 semiautomatic pocket pistol to kill Chad Oulson, forever 43.

The rest — whether it was about texting or bullying or stubbornness or testosterone or a cop’s mindset or etiquette or management failures or some blend of it all — is window dressing, stuff for gossips, speculators and storytellers.

Not that all that and more won’t become relevant at next February’s hearing, when Barthle will hear arguments regarding Reeves’ stand-your-ground claim. Then, at last, context will be everything. Then, at last, we’ll have it out.

Let’s be clear. The delay/deny business playing out here isn’t on Barthle. She’s the second judge on the case. Pat Siracusa recused himself last July after he became openly frustrated with both sets of lawyers’ delays, about the only area in which the prosecution and defense have been cooperative.

Assuming this date holds, the February hearing will unfold more than three years — roughly 1,100 days — after the bizarre episode inside auditorium No. 10 at the Cobb Grove 16 cineplex in Wesley Chapel.

At last, finally, the timeline will matter.

The Reeves and the Oulsons, married couples who’d never before laid eyes on each other, arriving minutes apart for the day’s first showing of “Lone Survivor.” The ensuing dispute over Chad texting during the pre-show entertainment. Curtis retreating to the lobby to ask the management to intervene.

Arguably, the entire texting chapter of our tragedy ended right there. This is not to say both couples could not have saved themselves endless heartache if, at this point, one or the other had found new seats. But that’s not what happened, and arguments can’t be hung from nonexistent pegs.

So the timeline resumes. Chad rising to confront Curtis when he returned, berating him for tattling, bouncing a box of popcorn off him, followed by a glinting object, claimed by the defense to be Oulson’s mobile phone. Curtis going into his pocket and coming out with the pistol, leaning forward and squeezing the trigger. Flash. Bang.

Curtis slumping back into his seat. Someone hearing Chad murmur, “I can’t believe I got shot” as a crimson floret bloomed on his shirt.

Now, everything depends on February, when Reeves’ attorneys will press Barthle to apply Florida’s stand-your-ground law, the statute that allows the use of deadly force when (a) a person is somewhere he has a right to be and (b) he reasonably believes such force is necessary to prevent death or great bodily harm.

Before stand-your-ground was enacted in 2005, people caught in similar circumstances had a legal obligation to retreat. In recordings taken after the shooting, Reeves concedes he wished he’d done exactly that.

Arguably, though, by the time Chad, having chosen to escalate a silly dispute, loomed in, the old cop’s avenues of retreat had vanished. Maybe, after all, Reeves acted reasonably.

What this isn’t, by any stretch, is an easy call. One man is dead. Another could spend the rest of his life in prison. And however it tilts, the outcome is sure to be imperfect. The survivors always will bear their scars.

Which brings us back to delays and denials.

Two-and-a-half years later, in the summer of 2016, everything remains mired in legal limbo, and will remain so until Judge Barthle decides whether the state can proceed. If she grants Reeves’ stand-your-ground motion, there will be no prosecution for second-degree murder. He will be immune from civil suits.

Until then, Reeves lives in the shadows of freedom, out on bail but restricted in his movements, his fate bound up in legal gymnastics.

And Nicole Oulson, Chad’s bereaved widow, one of two absolute innocents in all of this — we mustn’t forget now 3-year-old Lexi, the subject of Chad’s fateful texts — must muster on with her feet planted in two worlds: One where life moves on and Chad is forever absent, and the other, frozen in legal amber, where there’s always the darkness and Chad, and the roaring gun.

Tom Jackson, a resident of New Tampa, is interested in your ideas. To reach him, email .

Published July 6, 2016

Disney’s gator nightmare packs lessons for us

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Alligators are a fact of life in Florida. Walt Disney World is in Florida. Therefore, there are alligators at Walt Disney World.

This truth at the East Coast headquarters of the Happiest Place On Earth™ came to shocking light recently when a 2-year-old from Nebraska, Lane Graves, was snatched and drowned by a gator lurking in the manmade Seven Seas Lagoon near the Grand Floridian Beach Resort.

The sprawling, white Victorian-themed hotel, where Princess Diana once holidayed with princes William and Harry, now is known for tragedy beyond words.

American alligator
(www.CreativeOulet.com)

I concede my first reaction to reports of the attack was astonishment. Never mind the circular truth at the top; I honestly imagined Disney World was immune. I’ve been visiting the parks routinely since the early days of tear-off tickets, and I’ve never seen an alligator. Not one. And not for lack of searching, either, from shorelines, docks, around the campgrounds and aboard rented boats prowling quiet waterways.

Ultimately, I chalked it up to Disney’s fabled attention to detail. Somehow they’d figured out how to alligator-proof most of a Manhattan-sized slab of central Florida claimed out of swampland and pine forest.

Now I know better. Now I know Disney has an aggressive gator-wrangling program permitted by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. In the 10 years before the attack on little Lane, Disney-authorized trappers killed 239 “nuisance” alligators — reptiles longer than 4 feet that invade space reserved for humans.

They’ve since done away with six more, among them the suspect that will live forever in the nightmares of Melissa and Matt Graves, newly initiated into the miserable and inescapable fraternity of bereaved parents.

So I was partly right, anyway. Disney has an aggressive removal program. And partly, devastatingly, wrong: Its program isn’t foolproof.

Maybe no program can be. As former Disney World trapper Ron Ziemba told Reuters, “You’ll never be able to get them all. There are just so many canals, so many waterways. The gators travel a lot.”

This information is scarcely news to anyone who spends a fair amount of time in Florida. We see them basking on the banks of ponds and lakes, cruising lazily in rivers, and, on breathtaking occasion, crossing streets and golf course fairways.

We know the rules … don’t we? … about alligator safety. Don’t feed them, because doing so short-circuits their instinctive wariness toward humans. Avoid wading or swimming in their habitat, especially between dusk and dawn when they’re particularly active. Swim only in areas marked safe. Also, don’t presume: An absence of warning signs does not equal an absence of alligators.

More safety tips are available at the FWC web site, MyFWC.com. Among the more fascinating insights: Dogs in the water mimic gators’ preferred prey, so you should avoid taking them swimming.

Again, we’re Floridians. We pretty much know this stuff. And now, with the revelation out of Disney and the company’s response — they’ve erected barriers and new, stronger warning signs — we know this stuff better than we did. If alligators have breached the House of the Mouse, they are, indeed, everywhere.

But the Graves aren’t Floridians, and Florida’s economy relies on families such as theirs from faraway places to visit and spend, and go home sufficiently happy about the experience to spread the word among their friends and loved ones.

Accordingly, we need to assume what Florida’s tourists don’t know about alligators is, well, everything. I’ve heard more than my share of stories about visitors and newcomers being shocked into disbelief that alligators live, often literally, in our backyards.

Long before he went on to make a name for himself as a national golf reporter, Tim Rosaforte was a fresh graduate from a New England university playing his first round of golf at the University of South Florida with colleagues from the old Tampa Times. At No. 11, his tee shot checked up near what he took to be an 8-foot log lying by a pond.

At his approach, however, the log quivered and, as real logs never do, raised its head. Stopping dead, Tim assessed this surprise development by blurting, “What the hell is that?!”

At 22, Tim had never seen an alligator outside a zoo. Now this former college linebacker, still in fine tackling form, puddled before us while we looked on in amusement. In Florida, golf and alligators went together like grouper sandwiches and tartar sauce.

It was all we could do to keep him from leaving on the spot, packing up and fleeing north. Ultimately, Tim stayed and, having made a prudent peace with alligators — anything within 10 yards triggers a free drop — made his home in Florida.

In short, we can live together. We pretty much have to. But, the lesson out of Disney World is: We have some teaching to do. Maybe that involves the Legislature toughening signage statutes, but for now, it certainly involves us. That’s you. That’s me.

We have a duty to warn others about being careful out there.

After all, with brains that couldn’t fill a tablespoon, alligators are not going to figure this out on their own.

Tom Jackson, a resident of New Tampa, is interested in your ideas. To reach him, email .

Published June 29, 2016

Summer of sorrow calls us to love each other

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Only weeks have passed since the awful news that emerged from Meadow Pointe, but ensuing events in Orlando make it seem like a lifetime. So much atrocity packed into so little time. We hadn’t even crossed the solstice, and already it was the summer of sorrow.

But for many in our community, it began here, with the dark bathroom, the blocked door, the oozing blood, and the pure, inexpugnable horror beyond.

Fifteen-year-old Tovonna Holton’s image went viral on social media, following the the Wiregrass Ranch High School freshman’s death. (Facebook.com)
Fifteen-year-old Tovonna Holton’s image went viral on social media, following the the Wiregrass Ranch High School freshman’s death.
(Facebook.com)

And after that, the revelations and the conjecture, the grief and the fury. Tovonna Holton murmured she “owed them.” But surely she didn’t owe them this, the ultimate self-sacrifice. Surely not this. The life of a 15-year-old, so vibrant and full of possibility, in exchange — if the early narrative proves out — for cruel, brainless shaming?

It is too late for Tovonna, whose photographs reveal her beauty and outward joy, but fail to detect her brittle vulnerabilities. But, if there are young people in your household, or your neighborhood, or in your greater village where you work, play, worship, attend school or volunteer, now — yes, literally, now (tonight might be too late) — is the time to tell them: There is nothing so awful in your life that we cannot sort it out together.

I’m talking to adults, of course, but not just to adults. This is on teens and ‘tweens, too. This next is for them.

Guys, you know, oftentimes better than parents or the other adults in your lives, when your friends are aching, when they think they’ve been done wrong.

Nobody expects you to fix the hurt. But, you can be the key to helping make sure the hurt doesn’t explode. You can be the one who gives permission to seeking the grownup who can defuse the bomb ticking inside your friend.

Your elementary school training about stumbling upon mislaid weapons applies. Whether it’s an abandoned gun or your friend’s crisis, it’s not your duty to pick it up and carry it around. Instead, you provide support by getting help. And that help begins by gently introducing a responsible adult.

Sometimes it’s mom and/or dad. Sometimes it’s a pastor or a teacher or a counselor or a coach or a club sponsor or the principal. Maybe it’s one of the moms who’s always working the concession stand, even if her kids don’t run in your circles. Maybe it’s the neighbor with the slightly disheveled yard, or the manager at your favorite night spot.

The thing about grownups is, they’ve usually learned knowing all the answers is less important than knowing whom to ask when they’re stumped. And they — we — would much rather play the role of guide than mourner. We’d rather bring relief than casseroles and flowers.

What allegedly happened to Tovonna Holton — a surreptitious video of her showering, or bathing — posted on the internet, was unspeakable. If the claims survive scrutiny, then every step in the process violated Tovonna’s most precious rights: the right to innocence, the right to privacy, the right not to be exploited, the right not to be subjected to ridicule.

At the time this is being written, a spokesman for the Pasco Sheriff’s Office reports the agency is close to wrapping up its investigation. If the allegations are confirmed, it is difficult to imagine a punishment sufficient for those who conspired to propel Tovonna over the brink.

But, even if the source of ultimate trouble lay elsewhere, the shaming video exists. Did no one stop to think: “What’s the worst that can happen?” And its necessary follow-up: “Can I live with that?” These are always good questions to weigh, in every phase of life, but never more so than when what you’re plotting holds the potential to scar someone for life.

For life? Yes. The internet is forever. If she’d somehow found the courage and counseling to survive her tortured moment on the cliff overlooking oblivion, she’d have had to figure out how to get along knowing the footage was out there, always lurking.

“Explain this video,” says the college gatekeeper. “You want to tell me what was going on here?” says the personnel director between her and her dream job. “How did you wind up naked on YouTube?” asks the man who was almost Tovonna’s fiancé. And on and on and on.

And yet, we would surrender all that is good and reassuring about our species if we imagined even such an unforgivable prank couldn’t have been surmounted.

In the wake of the slaughter in the nightclub popular with Orlando’s LGBT community, people set aside their politics and upbringings to overwhelm blood banks. And, there’s movement on how to keep firearms away from smoldering bad actors tentatively identified by law enforcement.

Because these are things we can do. So is wrapping an arm around a troubled teen and saying, right now, “I am here. You are loved. Things will get better.”

Tom Jackson, a resident of New Tampa, is interested in your ideas. To reach him, email .

Published June 22,2016